A senior Olympics official has cautioned that holding the deferred Tokyo Games one year from now faces “genuine issues”, with even an immunization improbable to fight off the danger of the coronavirus.

John Coates, the International Olympic Committee’s go-to person for Tokyo 2020, showed that authorities would begin choosing in October if and how the pandemic-hit Games could proceed in July 2021.

He told a round table sorted out by Australian media goliath News Corp that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been clear the Tokyo Olympics couldn’t be deferred a subsequent time.

“We can’t postpone it again and we have to assume that there won’t be a vaccine or, if there is a vaccine, it won’t be sufficient to share around the world,” he said.

Without the safety net of a widely available vaccine, there could be enormous challenges in screening tens of thousands of people from all corners of the world, he said.

“We’ve got real problems because we’ve got athletes having to come from 206 different nations,” said Coates.

“We’ve got 11,000 athletes coming, 5,000 technical officials and coaches, 20,000 media, we’ve got 4,000 working on the organising committee there at the moment, there will be 60,000 volunteers coming,” he said.

“There’s a lot of people.”

Coates said if there are signs the pandemic is contained, even if not eradicated, by October, officials will start preparing “the different scenarios by which the sport could take place”.

“Do we quarantine the Olympic village? Do all athletes when they get there go into quarantine? Do we restrict having spectators at the venues? Do we separate the athletes from the mixed zone where the media are?”